With the upsurge of consumerism, the requirements imposed on the quality of an electronic product on the market is more and more strict. The designers as well as manufacturers of liquid crystal display (LCD) now not only have to put more attentions in product design but have to think up a way of improving the production efficiency and yield. For a manufacturer of a flat panel display, and more particularly a liquid crystal display (LCD), the lifecycle of product is always the crucial factor that the proprietors are contriving to extend its duration. Burn-in test provides an trustworthy approach for the LCD manufacturers to get through certifications of product quality and raise the reliability of product. Products that are approbated through burn-in test can ensure a high reliability and a prolonged lifecycle, and more importantly, the ex-factory products that are approbated through burn-in test can ensure a low failure ratio.
Because a LCD panel is apt to enter breakdown after an uncertain period of time during operation, there has been proposed a light-on aging tester to take remedial steps to correct such shortcomings. For the purpose of accelerating the aging process of defective LCD products during burn-in test and weeding out these defective products during test, a light-on aging step is necessarily required as a bulwark of the reliability of products for providing the manufacturers with a guarantee to satisfy their clients and end users. With such measure, the result of aging test can be examined in a closer fashion to find out the securest scheme to reform the manufacturing process.
With the burgeoning advancement of technology, small-sized low-temperature poly-silicon thin film transistor liquid crystal module (LTPS TFT-LCM) has become a must-have electronic product that is frequently used in daily life. Typically the LTPS TFT-LCM is applied with an information appliance (IA), such as a digital still camera, mobile phone, etc. In order to examine the aging status of LTPS TFT-LCM under various operation environments and conditions, a light-on aging test system will be involved during production test to strengthen the environmental test variables, accelerate the aging of the LTPS TFT-LCM and shorten the aging time of the LTPS TFT-LCM. Further, the statistical data derived from aging test is analyzed to investigate the aging progress of the LTPS TFT-LCM.
Currently, a conventional aging system for flat panel display chiefly includes a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device mounted on a printed circuit board, wherein the printed circuit board is placed within an environmental test cavity and is allowable to be electrically connected to a flat panel display for providing signals and driving voltages required by the flat panel displays, and thereby performs light-on aging tests to the flat panel display.
Thus far, the problem of the disunity among miscellaneous system architectures of information appliance developed by vendors remains unsettled, and have not been standardized yet. The specification of signal sources for use by a flat panel display comes from various aspects, and is feasible for medium-sized or large-sized LCD panel. Until now there has not emerged an appropriate specification of signal sources for use by a LTPS TFT-LCM. The manufacturers of LTPS TFT-LCM have to design a purpose-built FPGA device to accommodate the signal sources and driving voltages for use by a LTPS TFT-LCM. In addition, the driving capability of the signal sources rendered by the existing single FPGA device is limited that serves to drive a single flat panel display only rather than multiple flat panel displays. More disadvantageously, the price of a FPGA device is costly. These adverse factors heighten the cost of a light-on aging test system, and the yield of flat panel display can not be further upgraded because of the inadequate driving capability of the tester.